Daily Archives: September 27, 2006

Nope, you’re not the only one who believes that email may be the bane of your existence

If you hadn’t noticed the sponsorship news at Techmeme, clearly you’re living under a rock. In any case, check out what the fine folks at Socialtext had to say about getting on that train early.

BuzzLogic has released a $500/month web-based application that uses a variety of metrics such as inbound links and others to track conversations online, including among bloggers. Itâ€™s being sold as a product that will make online influencer research by big companies easier by identifying the most influential members of any given niche so that they can be more finely targeted.

At the DEMOfall 2006 tech conference, companies are showcasing software and hardware that extend the functionality of cell phones significantly. Not only can users take pictures, but some services will take those pictures and turn them into web-accessible documents that can be emailed or faxed. Other services are offering their own ways of manipulating pictures before sending them to friends, services that go well beyond today’s snap/email process. A company called FonPonds is letting customers subscribe to podcasts that are automatically delivered to the user’s phone. That could up listener number significantly without going through the sometimes painful education process.

Is Google good for your brand? It can be, depending on whether or not the company has and actively cultivates a good online reputation. Basically your brand reputation what people say it is so itâ€™s important that that be focus of a companyâ€™s efforts. Google â€“ and other search engines â€“ are how a good many people are going to begin their interaction with a brand name so, as Iâ€™m fond of saying, your reputation is only as good as Google says it is.

To promote the new budget transparency act just signed by the White House, the Office of Management and Budget has reached out to bloggers of all political stripes to promote the bill, which creates a searchable database of spending appropriations. This is kind of huge since it was bloggers who got the bill, which had been on an anonymous hold by a couple members of Congress, out into the open and eventually passed.

Like this:

As a Christian I welcome the inclusion of religious principles in public policy. But that’s as far as it should go. The government should in no way be involved in setting religious guidelines. If people are so eager to become subject to theocratic rule I suggest they convert to Catholicism and pay homage to the Pope. I’ll be over here using Scripture as the source of my belief (a very Lutheran philosophy) and realizing that God rules all while men rule for a fraction of time.

My main problem with the idea of a theocracy is this: Who decides which religious principles become the law of the land? Are they going to be strictly Episcopalian? Strictly Catholic? Or will the laws be drawn from a variety of faiths and homogenized until their unrecognizable? I would prefer a government that fights to make sure I can worship as I prefer instead of one that decides how I should worship. That’s kind of what the First Amendment says the government should be doing and not setting up some quasi-religious group that uses God as cover for all its bad decision making.

Theocracys seem to be based on the idea that man can – on any level – divine God’s thoughts. That’s a faulty premise and anyone who claims to do so immediately becomes suspect. It means they’re trying to make their ideas bulletproof and completely unavailable for questioning or debate. Man is faulty because, as the Bible teaches us, we live in a fallen and sinful world.

I have no problem with government using religious principles to guide their decision making. But the institutionalization of religion by government is a process that’s tailor made for abuse and suppression. I’ll let God, through the Word He’s given us in the Bible, show me how to live my life and would like government to not try and interpret that in a way that’s motivated solely by their selfish interests.